Users may seek to access to a wide range of resources (e.g., services and content) via a network. For example, users may desire to view web pages, blogs, engage in communications via email or instant messaging, share photos, use applications, and so forth. A variety of service providers provide a large selection of resources to users. Further, some resources of service providers may be protected such that user may need to be authenticated before access is permitted to the resources. Thus, techniques to authenticate users have been developed.
One traditional technique is to have users register and/or subscribe to individual service providers. In these cases, a user may gain access to resources by proving identity, such as by having the user supplying credentials (e.g., typing a username and password) when prompted. A service provider may then understand which user is accessing the resources. However, using these traditional techniques each user may need to remember and enter different credentials to access different resources from one or more service provider. In this traditional technique, authentication to each service provider occurs separately. Accordingly, numerous transactions, which add to network traffic, were required for a user to access resources from a variety of service providers. Further, the user inputted credentials each time resources from a particular service provider were sought. Therefore, these techniques resulted in user frustration and were burdensome not only to the user who may need to keep track and input a variety of credentials corresponding to different service providers, but also to network and computing resources utilized to authenticate credentials.